Powerhouse Lilli Lewis Headed To La Grange

The Linda Smalley Concert Series is bringing a performer with larger-than-life talent to town that you don’t want to miss. Problem is, you may not yet know her name. Bigger problem, you might not know her genre. So, you ask, why take a chance and go see her if you don’t know who she is or even what kind of music she’ll be doing? Why take the risk?

Here’s why. Folks you know who do take the risk we be telling you, “You should have been there. She was colossal. Such a voice. I was amazed.”

Lilli Lewis was trained as an operatic singer and a classical pianist. Rolling Stone calls her kind of contemporary music, “mystic troubadour.” She’s referred to her music as Americana and folk rock. In her own words, “I’m Lilli Lewis, creator of Orange music, a distant, more sober cousin of the Blues.” If that doesn’t exactly clear things up, you can also find references to her country origins and her jazz proclivity; she even has a gospel album out. While the brand of Lewis’s music is hard to specify, her impact is universal. NPR’s All Things Considered put her Americana album in its topten picks as did Rolling Stone Magazine. She headlined the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Kennedy Center, which dubbed her, “a powerhouse performer ….” More grandly, American Blues Scene Magazine claims she delivers, “… songs that threaten to tear a hole in the space-time continuum.” Whatever that means.

Perhaps the most revealing description is Grateful Web’s: “She personifies a contemporary Jessye Norman if folk rock had been her (Norman’s) genre.”

For me, though, I’m going with Mandy Patinkin’s simile: she’s “like listening to light.”

Lilli Lewis will perform at the Bugle Boy Saturday night, November 5 (for tickets, www. thebugleboy.org).

The next morning, Sunday, November 6, Lewis will provide the music for the 10:30 am worship service at the First Presbyterian Church in La Grange. This will be the annual All Saints service––a tradition supported by the late Bob Smalley. The Linda Smalley Concert Series he established will make this event possible and all are welcomed.

Attending this Sunday service might just be a way to pay one’s respect to the memory of both Bob and Linda Smalley. And, with Patinkin in mind, to hear what light sounds like.